piracy

The war on filesharing has stepped up a notch, with Cambodian police arresting a co-founder of notorious site The Pirate Bay on the instruction of Swedish investigators. Gottfrid Svartholm Warg was held after failing to report for his year-long jail sentence as ruled in February, with a spokesperson in Cambodia confirming to AFP that while there is no extradition treaty in place with Sweden, "we'll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case."

Piracy on PC is a big deal for publishers, but Ubisoft always seems to be in the spotlight when there's a new story on piracy or DRM. It's hardly a secret that Ubisoft has major issues with piracy, but before it's never really gotten down to hard numbers. Today, that changed in an interview with GamesIndustry International, in which Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that Ubisoft experiences a piracy rate of 93-95% on its PC games.

The federal government has continued its crack down on piracy, with the Department of Justice announcing that three different sites which market pirated Android apps have been shut down. The websites in question - applanet.net, appbucket.net and snappzmarket.com - are now all under the government's control, and all three display the same copyright notice that has graced Megaupload for the better part of the year. The DoJ says that this is the first time any websites relating to pirated mobile apps have been shut down.

Yesterday, Google announced that it will begin using copyright takedown notices to influence where sites show up in search results. The general idea behind it is that if a site has a lot of takedown notices (made under DMCA), it risks being demoted in search rankings. Obviously, this new decision has won the hearts of copyright advocates like the MPAA and the RIAA, but it's making those who would keep the Internet free and open a little uneasy.

It's time for Google to stand up to illegitimate sources of content, or so they say, with a new rankings system based on the number of valid copyright removable notices they receive. It's not long now that pirates of all types will be having a much harder time finding that torrent of the newest blockbuster film they've been wanting to see since it came out a day ago. Today's announcement from Google is just one more update to their copyright removal initiative re-booted just over two years ago.

Chalk another one up for the governments waging this anti-piracy war we keep hearing so much about, as Ukrainian authorities have taken down Demonoid. The raid on Demonoid's servers comes after the torrent tracking giant suffered a large-scale DDoS attack a few days before, and it seems that the US may have been involved in some way. Reports say that Anti-Cyber ​​Research Affairs of Kiev conducted the raid on Demonoid host ColoCall, copying all of the information on Demonoid's servers before shutting them down.

Mobile game developer Madfinger Games has blamed rampant Android app piracy for the sudden decision to drop its title DEAD TRIGGER from $1 to free, re-opening arguments about how much Google does to protect devs. "Even for one buck, the piracy rate is soooo giant" Madfinger Games wrote on its Facebook wall, "that we finally decided to provide DEAD TRIGGER for free."

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has spoken out on his frustrations around the Megaupload case, as well as praising Microsoft's visual design as something Steve Jobs would be proud of. The outspoken exec voiced his dissatisfaction with the Kim Dotcom case while at the Entel Summit in Chile, FayerWayer reports, refusing to comment on whether he believes high-ranking politicians had a hand in the investigation, but expressing dismay at some of the techniques used to bring Dotcom to trial.

Back in May, the judge presiding over the extradition case between Kim Dotcom and the US government ruled that Dotcom was allowed access to the files and information that the FBI held on him. Lawyers from both sides met yesterday to argue exactly what would be handed over, the result being a 40-page document compiled from 22 million emails obtained by the FBI.

The massive US copyright infringement case against Megaupload founder Kim DotCom has found itself in choppy waters, after courts found search warrants used to seize data were invalid. In addition to New Zealand police acting without due process in their evidence collection, the New Zealand Herald reports, Justice Helen Winkelmann also decided that the FBI's cloning of the confiscated hard-drives was invalid, as DotCom had not given his own consent to the process.